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Scientists in Texas were able to keep a pig’s brain alive and functioning for hours after removing it from the body.
Yay?
Well, that depends on your viewpoint.
The scientists who performed this unusual task on the pig at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center would say it is very exciting news.
“This novel method enables research that focuses on the brain independent of the body, allowing us to answer physiological questions in a way that has never been done,” said Dr. Pascual, Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics, and Physiology, and in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development at UT Southwestern.
According to the study, which was published in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers were able to keep the pig’s brain alive and functioning independent from the rest of the body for several hours using a device they developed.
“In an animal model using anesthesia, the researchers redirected the brain’s blood supply through a pump that maintained or adjusted a range of variables, including blood pressure, volume, temperature, oxygenation, and nutrients. The team found that brain activity and other measurements had minimal to no changes over a five-hour period,” the scientists explained in a statement.
Isolating the brain will allow researchers to manipulate inputs to this organ to study how they change brain function without the body’s influence. For example, Dr. Pascual said, he and his colleagues have already used this system to better understand the effects of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) in the absence of other factors. Although scientists can induce hypoglycemia by restricting food intake in lab animals or dosing them with insulin, the body can partially compensate for either of these scenarios by altering metabolism and this, in turn, alters the brain. In contrast, the new device allows researchers to alter the glucose content directly in blood pumped to the brain.
So… now yay?
This news bookends nicely with a 2022 study conducted by a research team at Yale School of Medicine where they were able to revive the organs of pigs an hour after the animals actually died.
Meanwhile, over at the University of Pennsylvania this week, Wired reports that surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania recently announced that they had successfully attached a genetically-altered pig liver to a brain-dead person and discovered that it would function normally for 72 hours.
The only reason the liver didn’t function longer, according to the doctors, is because they decided to stop it after three days.
“We were all taken by surprise because the liver still looked pretty good after three days,” said the leader of the study, Abraham Shaked, a surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania Transplant Institute.